Bang Paradox
by Kuro Guardian
Summary: It could have gone any number of ways. It could have been better. It could have gone so much worse... Right?


-1Bang.

And this time she dies.

The gunman is a nervous wreck; great beads of fear sweat standing out against his sallow skin like water across fawn parchment. Tiger-lily eyes dilate as the gun or perhaps the hand clutching it twitch something terrible. "Stand back!" It wasn't suppose to go like this Chanyou said it would go off without a hitch. Slick tongued Chanyou always making fun of him, always taking advantage lost it come show time. So now Chanyou has a bullet in his head; has his fuckin' brains splattered all over the fuckin' back wall.

Miike "pretty-boy" Gotou is freaked, is pissed, is going to blow the head off the next son-of-a-bitch, the next slit-tongue whore who walks through the door, who looks at him wrong. The hostages are whimpering in the far corner where he can see them. Watching them instead of the damn door like he oughta. "Freeze in the name -" Puts a slug between her huge cow-eyes. The idiots behind him screams. Stupid fuckin' bitch with her stupid long legs, stupid huge tits - should have fucked her at gunpoint. Goddamn cum-suckin' clap-riddin' slut. God, she's gorgeous, and she's got to still be warm. His fingers are already at his zipper. He's so hard it's painful, but not nearly so much as the fist that cracks his jaw.

Cheap shot, but it's got him on the hard, warm marble floor. A narrow, scarlet dribble down his chin. "Who?" Some dark-haired freak with a face like sorrow, like grief unremitting - if such emotion were a flower blooming. Hard to look up into something like that so he looks back at her. Gasps. From the cool, smooth marble floor its all so much prettier. The red more vivid; her shiny blond hair, now strawberry, now suicide red, with skin a blue-veined white. There's a great displacement of air - "Daddy" - and now the man is screaming clutching his head on his knees as Miike raises his gun. The gun clatters to the floor as a sniper puts a bullet through his fuckin' head. The pink marble floor sports a growing coat of lacquer red.

Bang.

And this time she lives - paralyzed.

The gunman is cautious, his stance apprehensive as great beads of cold sweat run down his long tan face. Tan skin gone a sickly grayish-yellow as shivers race beneath it. Despite his sallow cast, his eyes are as calm and calculating as a super-cooled C.R.A.Y.S. His hands are steady as they grip the gun he wrestled from Chanyou. Poor stupid Chanyou - **dead** - his grey matter a dripping scrawl across the far wall. The barrel still smokes as his finger lightly strokes the flesh-warm trigger. It's nearly a reflex - she doesn't even get to speak.

"Serena!" White gloves just barely miss, the bullet is not so careless. Darian's mask is sprayed with claret as her nape is "scrapped". Too slow it seems he is frozen watching her body silently crumble. Her eyes roll slowly upward - showing white. Miike looks to take advantage of his distraction raising his piece coolly. Unfortunately, for him, he does not see the black-haired girl, her shout just background noise. The fireball scores a direct hit evaporating his composure as he begins to flail. Screaming together neither man is aware of the other as their lives come to an untidy end. Darien is barely aware of the great displacement of air arms full of his bleeding future wife - he refuses to give her up.

The room is a white that is slowly eating them alive. His hands are clasped firmly in his lap as he bows his head in what looks like prayer. She's alive, but there's no hope of her living life as she might have. His hands begin to tremble shaking off the tears that fall upon them. Her legs are useless, though perhaps she'll keep the use of her arms and hands. The lights are washing away their detail leaving them blue-lined outlines. Her chest rises nice and steady totally unlike the jittery rasping of that day. His traitorous hands still feel gritty, sticky with her blood. How easily her chest rises, how easy it'd be to stop it. Just five minutes beneath the bright, white pillow. The nurse's hand upon his arm is heavy and cold.

He hides in his apartment unsure of how he survives and not really caring why. Spending the hours screaming at the empty rooms of his mind, raging at all the things he can't change. Fever dreams of Rini's horror, Rini's face as she is suddenly not and it's all his fault. All those precious, guilty memories of Serena's body transformed into nightmares of flesh and sweat. The only curves that don't repulse him are those of the bottles he ravishes. The truth stares back at him from every bottle, the bottom of every glass - the heavy material mocking him even as it shatters against the far wall.

Bang.

And this time she lives - sobbing pitifully as someone, anyone of them dies.

The gunman cowers behind the hardwood desk clutching the azure handgun like a prayer to his chest. His stomach is rebelling again - the stench getting to him. It's so quiet, the greater room a charnel house thanks to a shotgun gone wild. Only few minutes ago everything loud and the screams as the flesh is splattered around. Chanyou dead with a bright silver slug in his head. One he put there, and he - he dry heaves sweat cold on his forehead. Death, death is a whole 'nother ball game now.

A crunch - his eyes snap open and he uncoils. One quick, fluid movement like a snake striking. "Move!" The words are scrapping her perfect teeth even as the bullet is sliding home. A grunt as eyes turn blank. Spine snapped as the window cracks, shatters. Stop-motion explosion as a .50 caliber round destroys Miike's skull. Too late, another warm body dying in her fragile arms. Too late the somehow endless fount of red staining her pristine suit, her peerless skin - golden hair.

The echo remains battering her mind as the Dream dies along with her dark-haired beau. Shards of the Kingdom twinkling in the excess of his life, as the flowery ruin of his heart purges it's self. His eyes are so dark the light within them is drowning as Rini fades like dawn from the world. And she is too far gone to care seeing the countless years alone- so, so alone. His blood-speckled lips move soundlessly as Miike's body hits the floor.

The echo remains stretching forth like mirrors facing themselves as the tiny body's future hemorrhages from her belly. All the pink overlaid with red. Eyes as great as the sky overhead as Rini dies leaving a space in her chest that'll never be filled. A space dry with the inner desert slowly sucking the determination, the fire from her until she simply folds under all that might have been.

Sitting on the cold bench as her conscious accuses her in a voice very like Rei, very like the dark circus' mistress, very like a mother she has never seen. "This is your fault." And the faces of her surviving friends, of the lost one's loved ones are a slide show of grief she might have prevented. The air is rarified upon the roof and only the phantom warmth of remembered gore holds her to the unforgiving structure.

Bang.

And this time she lives - terrified, her eyes holes in her head - she kills him, but he is not extra-human. He, this pitifully crumpled pile of bloodied flesh - he is not super-human, not some form of demon, or any of a dozen other things easily written off the moral slate. He is a misguided man as human as she - more so hopelessly mortal like those she is meant to protect.

As the stupid, childish wand slips from sweat-slick fingers to bounce off the pink marble floor, she begins to cry. Great ragged sobs that make her head ache. It never really mattered before even when the walking corpses had looked human. Like the immature fool she is she had clung to the sop Luna so graciously gave her. That way it hadn't been more then a tug on the heart, a hitch in the breathing. Had only mattered when seen through the eyes of other people, like Molly. Green blood on green leaves. She gasps, the pain like a shock of cold water; this blood isn't green, instead a complementary red brighter then denial.

Red blood creeping across the sun-warmed stone and, and it can't be written off, can't be justified so that. So that she collapses unable to take it. Warm and syrup-thick against her milk-white knees. A rusty laugh falls bluntly from numb lips followed by a cavalcade of hysterical cackling. A murmur of worry surges from the far corner. Steps crack closer slowly as though wary of her reaction. "Sailormoon?" She shakes her head whipping away tears with the force, cracking her slender column of a neck. "Sailormoon!" So hard to hear as she stubbornly quits - curled fetal tight within the echoing pandemonium of her head. "Serena!" Shadows play across her face as her eyes pinpoint.

She might as well have died, the nervous skinny little waif hiding within medicinal shadows. Sliding down cool white hallways, and stumbling over the peach-colored carpet, over a wide-eyed Rini hidden in the corners, across the worn wooden boards of yet another temple. Swathed in black tugging the red, silken cord with thin hands scrubbed raw. Clapping the freshly, earnestly scrubbed pair as she prays to mocking, judgmental gods.

She deserves all she gets - Rini slowly shifting, confused as to whether she is a dark, little over-sexed hellion or a bruisen-eyed little waif. Darien continues to drink having given up on saving her - though he beds her every night as Rini's continued existence shows. Uses her roughly in retaliation, though against who - he, herself, or the world - no one can tell. The breeze is cool, causing her thin frame to shiver as she fearfully cups her rounding belly.

Bang - the gunman shoots himself.

Blood spray and brain matter in a slow-motion explosion about the energetic metallic slug swiftly embedding it's self in the far wall.

Bang- a cop is short.

He aims at her when the brown-eyed cop steps into range gun just raised. He falls back blood sprouting forth from the quarter-sized hole in his chest.

Bang- a child.

Her doll has eyes as blue as china, and skin-like silk with hair as curly as a lion's mane. There is a single great crack spidering her pretty face. The little girl's blood stains it's right side.

Bang - a man, a woman, a dog, the roof.

A scream, a yelp, the wailing of a bereaved heart.

Bang. Bang. Bangbangbang.

Bang - "it doesn't matter."

Bringing her head in contact once more with the eggshell white wall she says again - "it doesn't matter." Banging, banging, banging her head against the dingy, bird-chest thin wall she silently continues her mantra of "it doesn't matter." Silently continues mouthing her only comfort whilst her dish-wide eyes stare at the ticking clock. The ticking black cat clock with it's funny moving eyes.

Ticking, ticking away another hour and another day - and still Luna is dead. The black cat's golden crescent mark tarnished with blood, and Artemis's back legs useless, fur a sticky red. Ami lying in the hospital where she'll probably never wake up. Her mother falling apart - a stature breaking asunder as the quiet crushes it and the steady beeping, beeping chisels away all resolve.

Leia still unconscious at the temple and Rei blaming herself showering unresponsive cheeks and hands and lips with salt-stained kisses. Darien is fine, eye forever clouded - but _fine_. Fine and stop picking at me he says. She's _fine_ - Rini is having nightmares robbing her of what little sleep she can get - _really fine _- Rini will never stop having these nightmares - honestly. _'It could have been worse'_, she wraps her golden hair about her neck. _'It might have been better' _- silken, cool and soft as she tugs it tighter. "It doesn't matter."


End file.
